Artist in focus: Zaha Hadid

December 2010

London based architectural designer Zaha Hadid's work encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale through to products, interiors and furniture. As the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in its 26 year history, Iraqi born Hadid has defined a radically new approach to architecture by creating buildings, with multiple perspectives and fragmented geometry to evoke the chaos of modern life.

Internationally acclaimed as 'deconstructivist architecture', Hadid's work shatters the classically formal as well as modern rules of space by reassembling walls, ceilings, floors into what she calls "a new fluid, kind of spatiality". The MAXXI Art and Architecture site in Rome, which opened in May 2010, exemplifies her innovative approach to space. Covering 30,000 square metres, the concrete structure with glass roof camouflages the former army barracks site with an eye-catching extension of galleries, made from long intertwining and intersecting ramps. The prominent winding walls have been designed by Hadid to be exhibited on both the interior and exterior, "so you can have murals, projections, installations: it is about an interior-exterior existence" and offering "a world to dive into, rather than a building as a signature object".

Her latest project in Baku, Azerbaijan the 'Heydar Aliyev Cultural Pavilion' is under construction and will be a welcome addition to the city’s new cultural hub, which will include several national and international museums, including a Guggenheim branch. Hadid's fluid design for the Cultural Pavillion will include a library, three auditoriums and a museum. The museum's glass façade will radiate like waves and create a sculptural interplay between the building and the ground, folding and merging with the topography on which the architectural site stands. "The beauty of the landscape - where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together - has never left me," says Hadid, "I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way."

Over the years Hadid has silenced all those who said her architecture was impossible to build. With her innovative designs now occupying all corners of the globe from Azerbaijan to Abu Dhabi, Moscow to Montpellier, Salerno to Scotland, Hadid is a remarkable universal cultural practitioner. 

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